


Too Late to Change Me

by Karabair (likeadeuce)



Category: Henry IV - Shakespeare, Shakespeare Histories - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Clothing Kink, F/M, Gallows Humor, Hangover, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:13:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/Karabair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between alcohol-fueled business meetings with his uncle, encounters with a not-amused girlfriend, and the way that Hal just won't stop texting him, Harry Percy has definitely had better days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Late to Change Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ems](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ems/gifts).



> Modern AU, set at Harvard, based VERY loosely on the world of the film "The Social Network." I meant this to be Harry/Hal but it turned out more Harry/Kate, though, as in canon, there's plenty to speculate about if you're so inclined. Title and epigraph are from a song by Billy Joel.

_You may be right_  
I may be crazy  
But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for  
It’s too late to fight  
It’s too late to change me  
You may be wrong for all I know  
But you may be right  
-Billy Joel

There are very few positions more uncomfortable for sleeping than sprawled out on the hard floor of a dormitory restroom with your cheek on the edge of the shower stall. It was not, however, the basic awkwardness of the position that woke Harry Percy up. No, that was not what woke him up at all.

It was his fucking iPhone.

Specifically, it was the alternation between tingling vibrations against the outside of his right thigh, and a metallic replication of Billy Joel singing. "You may be right/I may be crazy."

Harry turned over on his back, crashed his head against the floor, and groaned. _Hal._ He had assigned that particular ringtone to Hal Monmouth with the express purpose of reminding him _not_ to pick up Hal's calls. Harry felt his stomach heaving and, just in time, he was able to dash to the toilet, grip the rim, and retch the contents of his stomach into the porcelain bowl. He couldn't remember exactly what he had consumed this afternoon (wait, it had been afternoon?) but likely a lot of expensive appetizers and a hell of a lot of booze. Expensive booze, too. Hal's father had been paying.

Harry shut the lid, sat down on top of it, and rubbed his mouth with the sleeve of his dress shirt. _That_ had been expensive, too, but right now it looked like the garbage bin was its last best hope. He was just in the process of staring down at his own hands, contemplating the advantage of getting the soiled fabric away from his skin against the effort it would require to raise his arms over his head, when the phone jangled again.

_You may be right --_

Harry had a momentary panic that the phone might somehow have gotten into the toilet bowl -- he wanted to replace the stupid thing anyway, and all his contacts and apps were backed up on the cloud but he was distressed, at the same time that he hated being distressed, by the idea that he might never find out Hal was trying to _say_ to him -- when he realized that made no sense, because if the phone was drowned he wouldn't be able to hear it. So he crawled out of the stall and managed to locate the phone on the floor over by the shower where he had originally passed out. Then he picked it up, and his clumsy fingers did the one thing he _hadn't_ wanted them to do, which was actually to pick up the call.

"Percy?" Hal's voice came through the microphone.

Harry hastily hung up, and, through some miracle of muscle memory, his fingers were able to execute the proper commands to block incoming calls from that number. Just until he got caught up with what exactly had _happened_ that afternoon, to have an idea of what he should and shouldn't be saying to Hal.

Harry slumped down against the side of the stall and started browsing through his received messages. Thirty-seven of them. All from Hal.

_Percy: What the hell happened today? My bros. = totally unhelpful. - H_

_:HP: I'm serious here. I heard all kinds of things. Your father, your uncle, my father, my brothers. WTF? -HM_

_:I know I should have been there myself but it got CRAZY at the BH. Prob w/ JF's tab? Cops were called. Insanity._

_:H? Went by your place. Not home? R U passed out somewhere at 4 PM? THAT IS MY JOB! LoL._

_:Hope silence doesn't mean U & me R off. Have faith in this deal! Killer app! Could be greatest thing since Zuckerberg met Saverin._

And more in that vein. A lot more. Harry took a deep breath to gather his resources, thinking about how to craft a witty reply. Then he typed, "I hate you," into the keypad, and hit "send" 37 times in a row. There was something Zen about the whole exercise (he got a few incoming texts as he was going, all presumably from Hal, but he steadfastly ignored them) and, when he was done, blocked the number from incoming texts as well. It shouldn't take Hal long to figure out a workaround, but that would give him some space, and maybe if Harry was lucky his battery would die in the meantime.

Harry dragged himself to his feet, glanced back at the toilet and decided that he couldn't have vomited anymore if he wanted to. So he flushed, walked to the sink, and opened a cabinet to look for his toothbrush and mouthwash. But nothing was, it seemed, exactly where it ought to have been. So he splashed some water on his face, then started to take off his shirt as he turned around and kicked open the door. It swung to. He shouldered through it, got halfway and stopped.

Kate Mortimer sat on the bed, her arms crossed, giving him angry eyes of death. It was, unfortunately, an easy look for him to recognize at this point in their relationship.

"This is," he said, looking around the room to take in as many clues as possible. The fact that the room was clean, for one thing, and had curtains. "This is _your_ room," he said, then looked back over his shoulder. "That's your bathroom. I'll –" He turned back toward Kate and gave her what was, in his experience, in many circumstances, a winning smile. "I'll clean it up," he said.

Unfortunately, what had qualified as "winning" at various points in the past seemed to work less and less often these days. Particularly when it came to Kate.

"Are you aware," she said, fingers tapping against her forearm, "that it is seven o'clock in the evening? That you told me you were going to your uncle's club in Beacon Hill for some sort of _cocktails_ at _noon_ and if I gave you the key, you would come over in time to take me to _dinner_?

It all, once she said it, seemed vaguely familiar. There had been cocktails and then some kind of a fight. Harry remembered being extremely angry about something that had seemed important at the time. . .

He grasped onto the one part of her speech that he could process and said, with some relief, "You _gave_ me a key?" Because he could just imagine finding his way back to Cambridge on the "T" and stumbling into Kate's dormitory, but if he had escaped being arrested for being drunk in public, he would hate to get his criminal record started with breaking and entering. Particularly when the room he had entered belonged to someone he was _pretty sure_ still counted as his girlfriend.

Harry was becoming more and more certain that this was, in some indescribable way, Hal's fault.

"I gave you my key," Kate said, "because I was going to be _in class_ and I had some strange idea that we were still dating and that I was interested in going to bed with you. At some point."

Harry stared at the bed. After a long pause, he asked, "Now?"

"Oh, yes," she said in a tone dangerously bereft of any inflection whatsoever. "Do me, baby, right here. Right now."

If Harry's current physical circumstances had made it possible for him to entertain the remotest hint of a sexual impulse (and they didn't), then the ice in Kate's voice would have been enough to kill it. He let out a sigh. "I don't suppose," he said, looking down at his soiled shirt front, "that I have anything resembling any kind of clean clothes lying around in there?"

Kate's sigh mirrored his. She held up a wrinkled red oxford that he vaguely remembered letting her tear off of him at some happier, easier time. "This should do," she said. "I even washed it at some point." He realized that she must have been holding onto it, waiting for him to ask.

Kate walked toward him, then pressed the flat of her hand between his shoulder blades and steered him toward the sink. "Take off your shirt," she said softly. Obediently he did, and then Kate reached around him and turned on the hot water. Harry let the soiled shirt fall to the floor. Kate draped the fresh one over his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and pressed against his back, letting her chin rest in the crook of his shoulder.

Harry could see her eyes, in the mirror, worn and weary but still lovely. As opposed to his own pale, sick-looking face. Then the steam from the hot water rose, obscuring their image until there was nothing to see.

"I wish," she said, "that you would tell me what was going on." She ran a hand down the edge of the sleeve, then the inside of his arm, until her fingers closed around his wrist. "If I wanted to be with someone who got pass-out drunk in the middle of the day and never told me anything? I could still be dating Hal."

"You know that I'd like to tell you." Because it was all coming back, now, and truthfully, he would rather have enjoyed the chance to bounce some thoughts off of someone who had an abundance of common sense. Whatever virtues could be claimed by the attendees at his uncle's meeting _that_ wasn't one of them. "The thing is, honey. It's all business."

"And clearly I'm too stupid to understand anything about business."

"I don't mean that at all." He wriggled out of her grip and started to work his arms into the shirtsleeves. "It just happens there are things I'm not at liberty to discuss."

"Right," Kate sniffed. "Things _men_ do."

"That's got nothing to do with it!"

She stepped back from him and crossed her arms. "So there were a lot of women at this meeting?"

"Well. . ."

Before he could answer the unanswerable, she demanded. "Were you talking about my brother? If this was all about Eddie and I'm not allowed to know?" She shook her head. "Percy, we all appreciate your loyalty, but before your family puts your future on the line -- well, don't you think you ought to figure out if my brother might be guilty of what the government wants to charge him with?"

"No way," said Percy. "Ed isn't a hacker. Lancaster Inc. is just trying to use the FBI as leverage to get my father and my uncle to fall in line and. . ." He shook his head. "No. Sorry, but I can't discuss this. Even if I could explain it, you don't know enough about programming --"

Kate sniffed. "Good thing you talk in your sleep."

"I do not. . .I've never . . ."

"In your sleep," she repeated with a smirk. "Strings of numbers? Platforms and interfaces? You're right that I don't know what it means, but if I got a tape recorder, I could transcribe it all. I could probably sell it."

"Not funny."

"I'm not being funny. For all you know, I've already done it. I'm being extremely serious." Then, as though to contradict herself completely, Kate stuck her tongue out at him.

"My head hurts," Harry muttered. "And I have to get out of here."

Kate's nose wrinkled. "Use some mouthwash anyway." Then she walked off and left him in the bathroom.

He emerged, minutes later, more or less fully dressed. "I have to go out," he said.

"I wasn't really counting on dinner at this point."

"Kate, we'll talk about this when it's all over. I just – right now this is a very sensitive business deal and I need to work it out with . . ."

"Someone besides me?"

"This will be over before you know it." He stepped toward her, leaning down to kiss her forehead. She seemed to give in more than she appreciated the gesture.

With a sigh, Kate said, "Just promise me you're not letting Hal get involved in this."

"Hal is the last person to worry about here," Harry assured her. "He's just a dumb frat boy. Doesn't know a thing about business _or_ technology."

"Hmm," said Kate. Not entirely convinced.

Just then, the phone in Harry's pocket rattled out the chorus: _You may be right/I may be crazy_

"Huh," said Harry, reaching down to silence the ringing. "I don't know how he did that."


End file.
